Our study of Otis Q. Sellers’s excavation of God’s Word for what it says about “soul” continues. (See Part I and Part II.) The ground having been cleared, we can now display the raw nuggets of textual information he mined for his 1939 booklet, What Is the Soul?
“In these studies,” he writes, “the method will be to present a concordance to a group of passages, then deal with such passages as may seem necessary,” a concordance being a list of words in the text, the text being the Bible, the first subsection of which is Genesis [1]: “In Genesis, every passage will be dealt with in some manner. This is to acquaint the student with the method so that he can follow on himself in passages that I have felt needed no exposition. After Genesis, the only treatment given to many passages will be to list them in the concordance.”
The first word under consideration is נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh). Not being formally trained in Hebrew, Sellers claims that the list “has been checked from every possible angle, and I feel I have been guilty of no oversight or carelessness in this matter. If I have, the Hebrew or Greek scholar can correct me, and I will gladly acknowledge any oversight or error that has been unwittingly made.”
I, too, await their judgment of Sellers’s use of the tools his fellow scholars made available to him and to countless others. In the interest of space, I will pass over the exhaustive list of the occurrences of נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh) in Genesis in favor of a focus on key passages. [2]
In Genesis 1:20 are, Sellers writes, “three prominent Hebrew words: … sherets [שֶׁ֖רֶץ], which is translated [in the KJV] ‘creature,’ and … nephesh chaiyah [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה] … ‘life.’ … In this passage the words “bring forth abundantly” and “moving creature” are but different grammatical forms of one expression in the Hebrew. [My emphasis—AGF] [Joseph Bryant] Rotherham [1828-1910] translates this as
Let the waters swarm with an abundance of living soul.
A more literal translation would be
Let the waters swarm with swarms of living souls.
“To swarm” involves the idea of motion. From this first occurrence of the word nephesh we learn that God calls the moving, living things in the sea living souls.
In verse 21 the KJV refers to “every living soul that moveth.” As man has not yet been created, “this refers only to animal life.”
… [A] distinction is being established between living things that move and living things that do not move. Plants are living things, but they do not and cannot move. They are rooted in their place. They grow from the warmth of the sun, derive nourishment from the soil and carbon from the air. Yet, they do not enjoy the warmth of the sun, neither do they feel any sensation or consciousness from all that happens to them. Plants are never called souls, but not so with animals. They are called living souls. They move from place to place; they have sensation and consciousness; and these are the chief characteristics of those things that God calls living souls.
When Sellers gets to Genesis 1:24—“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה, nephesh chaiyah] after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so”—he observes that
The first time the word nephesh occurred [Genesis 1:20] the translators rendered it “life.” The second and third times [Genesis 1:21, 24] it is rendered “creature,” the fourth time [Genesis 1:30] “life,” and the fifth time [Genesis 2:7] “soul.”
Sellers apparently felt justified in imputing bad motive to the translators.
It is obvious that the translators desired to cover up the fact that God called the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, living souls. Many readers will remember having heard great emphasis placed upon the theory that in the account of creation man alone is called a living soul. The simple evidence proves that this is false …. [My emphasis—AGF]
In the Word of God the same Hebrew phrase nephesh chaiyah … is used by Moses in his account of man, fish, fowls and beast. He uses this term of the lower creatures before he applies it to man, and he uses it again of them immediately after he has applied it to man. [My emphasis—AGF]
“To all living souls,” Sellers proceeds, “God gave the vegetation for meat and food.” [Genesis 1:30] Man and beast as originally created were vegetarians. Man did not eat the animals, neither did the animals eat one another.” Sellers then notices the following inconsistency:
… [I]n Genesis 1:20 the translators began with “life” but had to abandon it in Genesis 1:21 and 24, for it would not fit. They could not say “living life,” so they used the word “creature.” In this passage they must abandon the word “creature” and swing back to “life” for “creature” will not fit here.
But the word “life” is also wrong. If God had desired to say “life,” why did He not use the Hebrew word for “life” [חי, chay] instead of the word for “soul”? Was He unable to select His own words? Did the august translators need to correct Him, even as we need so often to correct our children?
Sellers takes no exception to the Authorized Version’s translation of Genesis 2:7—“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”:
It not only tells us how man was made, it tells us what he is, and of what he consists…. This is the earliest and certainly the fullest account we have given us of human nature. It demands our closest consideration, for it is the word of the Maker telling us the nature of the creature which He made.
Sellers elaborates:
First, we are told that God formed man of the dust of the earth. It is important to note here that it was the man that He formed. [My emphasis—AGF] Not a habitation for some man who was to move in, but the man. Some will insist that it was the body, and this will not be denied. God could have said “body,” but He did not do so. He had the word for body, but He did not use it. He used the word for man. [My emphasis—AGF]
… Plato taught that man was not formed of the dust of the earth. He taught that the real man was a soul which for some reason was united to a body. This union Plato considered an evil, and he regarded death as a blessing in itself, for it dissolved the undesirable union and freed the real man from that which was only a burden to him…. God formed man of the dust of the earth. He was man before he could feel, breathe or think. [My emphasis—AGF]
What happened next?
… [W]e are told that God breathed into his (the man’s) nostrils the breath of life. As a result of this divine operation the man became something that he had not been before. Man became a living soul. Before the breath of life was breathed into his nostrils man had been a beautifully fashioned and wonderfully organized lifeless figure. He became, by a further act of God, a living soul. Man, in his origin was only dust; man, in the perfection to which God by a second operation brought him, became a living soul. [My emphasis—AGF]
The upshot is that “the whole man as a living sentient being is a soul.”
As originally made, man had a body made of soil and … every organ that the human body has now. It had a brain, eyes, ears, nose, hands, and feet. But the brain could not reason; the eyes could not see; the ears could not hear; the nose could not smell; the hands could not labor; the feet could not move.[3] The man as created from the soil was lacking no organ, but he needed yet something from God to make him a living soul. The thing needed was the “breath of life”; so by a divine operation, not performed for the lower animals, God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life.
Notes
[1] Sellers appended this note: “The concordances in this pamphlet are
based upon Wigram’s Englishman’s Hebrew and Chaldee Concordance and Wigram’s Englishman’s Greek Concordance. These have been revised to better fit the requirements of this pamphlet, and have been carefully checked from every possible angle to insure accuracy. In transliterating Hebrew and Greek into English characters Young’s Analytical Concordance has been followed. The Exhaustive Concordance by Dr. James Strong is the authority for all pronunciations given in the footnotes.”
[2] This link will take one to a PDF of What Is the Soul where the exhaustive list may be perused.
[3] Strictly (if more cumbrously) speaking, the man could not yet reason with his brain, see with his eyes, hear with his ears, smell with his nose, labor with his hands, or walk with his feet, for he, the man, was not yet a living soul.
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